Field of the Invention
This invention pertains in general to the field of breathing apparatuses. More particularly the invention relates to user interfaces of such breathing apparatuses, in particular graphical user interfaces (GUI's) thereof.
Description of Prior Art
Users of breathing apparatuses comprise commonly two groups of users, namely clinical personnel operating the apparatus, and patients receiving ventilatory care. Another group of users of some breathing apparatuses, however, are also members of the family of ventilated patients, or other persons like visitors of the patients, e.g. in intensive care units. This group of users is herein denominated as secondary users. For instance parents of young children treated in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs) often are put under physiological and even physical stress by the highly technical environment including numerous medical devices permanently showing a multitude of information including complex graphs, curves, metrics. This information is primarily intended for the clinical user and can thus be difficult to interpret for secondary users, thus leading to the aforementioned stress and unnecessary anxiety, concerns, uneasiness, disquiet, nervousness of the secondary users, which are all undesired conditions that are highly desired to be reduced or eliminated.
Screens of intensive care ventilators display during operation a multitude of data, and graphs related to operation thereof, like monitored parameters. It may for instance be very stressful for parents of neonates under treatment in neonatal care units to be exposed to a screen of an intensive care ventilator during the entire time of their stay.
However, reducing this information is a difficult issue as clinical situations may be entered anytime where it is highly important for the clinical personnel to have immediate access to the clinical operation of the apparatus.
Hence, an improved breathing apparatus would be advantageous, in particular providing for reduced stress of secondary users.